


crying for the day (don’t leave me standing here)

by ice_connoisseur



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Gen, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), and Natasha Romanov deserved better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-23
Updated: 2019-05-23
Packaged: 2020-03-13 07:01:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18935812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ice_connoisseur/pseuds/ice_connoisseur
Summary: The kicker is, when they fight and it counts, Nat will always win.





	crying for the day (don’t leave me standing here)

**Author's Note:**

> I have approximately sixty-three thousand feelings about Endgame, good and bad. This covers maybe two or three of them.

Clint wakes up sitting waist deep in cold water on a planet so far from Earth he doesn’t know how to even begin measuring the distance. 

And the thing is, he’s never actually been alone before.  He left the orphanage with Barney and ran straight into the circus; from there he found SHIELD and Phil Coulson and then Nat, who between them shook him up and straightened him out just in time for him to meet Laura and actually deserve her.   But Phil is long dead and his family vanished into a puff of dust.  At some point in his life he has betrayed or let down every single person he ever cared about, lost sight of any morals or codes he might have once followed, and now Nat is gone because he couldn’t stop her. 

All the people who mattered and anyone who ever loved him is dead, no one to miss him or mourn him or care, and yet if he doesn’t climb to his feet and start moving forwards it will feel like he is failing them all the same.  

He reappears on the platform with the waters of Vormir still damp on his trousers and the last bruise Natasha Romanoff will ever leave starting to throb over his ribs.  It is days before it starts to fade, and when it is does it is like losing her all over again.

 

* * *

  

The blunt truth of the matter is, Nat is better than Clint at hand-to-hand. In sheer strength he has the edge, with aim it’s not even a competition, and when it comes to stealth and infiltration they each have their own complimenting talents. But in an all-out fight Nat has him, every time.

 

* * *

 

The first time they fight Clint isn't meant to be close enough to speak to her, never mind touch. Coulson will ask him, later, _why her?_ , and Clint won’t ever have the words to explain it. She is desperate and lost and he isn’t, not anymore, but he remembers a time when he was and he recognises it in the set of her face and the tilt of her shoulders.

That’s not to say she comes quietly. He corners her in a crappy single-room apartment on the fourth floor of an anonymous building and gets his ass handed to him. This is not a surprise; he has been watching her for days and studying what little intel SHEILD has on her for weeks before that. He knows going in that in a straight fight on her turf she will take him, albeit not easily. He fights her only to buy time, to eke out long enough to sell her the same whisper of a dream the Coulson once used to break through to an angry ex-delinquent, ex-carnie, ex-runaway.

They destroy what little furniture the room contains and by the end Clint has three cracked ribs and Nat has a bite wound on her right arm that will scar and stay with her, a good memory to carry on her skin alongside the bad. They finish with Clint flat on his front, Nat’s knife to his throat, and that should be it, the end. Instead she sheaths the knife and helps him to his feet in one fluid move, and it is only the very start.

 

* * *

 

Over the years that follow they spar often, in SHIELD gyms and anonymous safe houses, once and only once in Coulson’s apartment, over the last spring roll (which Coulson eats while they try to avoid permanent damage to his paintwork). Coulson is a constant in all other aspects of their lives, and the three of them build up a reputation as the very best SHIELD has to offer. In the field he is their eyes and ears, always, reporting and guiding and watching their backs, but when they fight at home he leaves them to it; they each have their own rituals with him, and yet more for all three of them together, but the crash of bodies against the mat and the slap of flesh meeting flesh is how the two of them first learnt to communicate with each other, and that’s not something they ever lose. They are both better with actions than with words.

So it isn’t strange, the second time they fight for real, to not have Coulson in their ears and at their backs, because he never is when they are fighting each other. Afterwards, yes. Afterwards, in the mess of politics and damage control and search and rescue that follows, his absence is a gaping wound whose jagged edges will never quite heal. But in the bowels of the Helicarrier it is just the two of them, and the part that feels most wrong is Clint's grim, focused silence. 

Years have passed since the first time they faced each other in earnest. The first time they were strangers, Clint fighting for the promise of _something_ that he had recognised in the redhead’s eyes. This time they know each other, better than they know anyone else on the planet, their bodies trained to work with and against the other. But no amount of time or training or knowledge changes the fact that Nat goes in with the upper hand and keeps it. Clint claws his way back to himself with a combination of his own stubborn pigheadness and the familiar feel of Nat’s fist colliding solidly with his jaw before everything goes black.

 

* * *

 

They spar less, once the Avengers move from being a figment of Nick Fury’s terrifying imagination and mould into something approaching a cohesive team. They know each other’s patterns and tells too well by now for there to be much of a challenge in training together, not when there are super soldiers and literal actual _gods_ at their disposal. They spend more time eating terrible take out and less time pounding each other into the mat, and Clint wonders with a degree if incredulity if this is what growing up actually is. It’s different, but it’s not _bad_ different, even if Laura does tease him for being an old man when he explains it to her.

It doesn’t last. Once upon a time it was just the three of them, Clint and Nat and Coulson against the world, but Phil is gone and these days the world can’t seem to quite decide if it’s with or against them from one moment to the next. He can’t just think of himself anymore. His family are kept safe only through absolute secrecy, and every day that feels a little less secure.

Leaving wasn’t an option Clint ever thought he would have, until suddenly he does. There aren’t many people Clint trusts with Nat, trusts to earn her loyalty and friendship for its own sake before anything else – not the army, no General Ross, and certainly not Nick Fury - but Phil Coulson was one, and now Steve Rogers is another.

 

* * *

 

Meeting again in the middle of Stark and Roger’s stupid dick-measuring contest is, frankly, _fun_.  A throwback to the very best of their early days, learning each other’s bodies and minds and hammering out the start of a friendship that transcends this petty squabble. There’s nothing really at stake here, not between the two of them, and so to throw themselves against one another is nothing but joy, a reminder of simpler times and proof that they are still both of them alive and kicking, against all the odds.

Clint tries to claim victory in that one, later; Nat maintains that Wanda’s interference negates the whole thing. They joke about rematches but neither of them truly expects it; the world has changed around them so many times and yet here they still are, still standing on the same side. It’s impossible to imagine that there’s anything that could come between them that hasn’t already tried and failed.

 

* * *

 

And then Vormir.

 

* * *

 

The kicker is, when they fight and it counts, Nat will always win. He knows this; it was the very first thing he ever learnt about her, before they even met, and nothing in the years since has changed enough to undo that fact.

 

* * *

 

That doesn’t mean he isn’t going to _try_.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I spent a long time trying and failing to reconcile fanon and canon for Clint’s backstory in this; it didn’t feel right to completely ignore Laura and the baby Bartons in an Endgame-centric fic, but I’ve spent seven years reading Clint/Coulson early-days-at-SHEILD to the point where it’s saturated my every read on his character, regardless of who he’s sleeping with. So a compromise was (sort of?) reached.


End file.
